By some estimates, nearly seventy percent (70%) of corporate data in the United States and abroad resides on mainframe computers, e.g., S/390 mainframes manufactured by International Business Machines. Moreover, business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce is expected to grow at least five times faster than the rate of business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce. Many transactions involving this corporate data can be initiated by Windows/NT servers, UNIX servers, and other servers but the transactions must be completed on the mainframe using existing legacy applications residing thereon.
One very crucial group of legacy applications are the message format service-based information management system applications (“MFS-based IMS applications”) on which many businesses depend heavily. MFS is a facility of the IMS transaction management environment that formats messages to and from many different types of terminal devices. As businesses upgrade their technologies to exploit new B2B technologies, there is a requirement for an easy and effective method for upgrading existing MFS applications to include e-business capabilities. One such e-business capability is the ability to send and receive MFS-based IMS transaction messages as extensible markup language (XML) documents.
The MFS language utility compiles MFS source code, generates MFS control blocks in a proprietary format and uses the control blocks to indicate to an IMS application how input and output messages are formatted. For input messages, MFS control blocks define how a message that is to be sent by a device or remote program is mapped to an application program's input/output (I/O) area. For output messages, MFS control blocks define how the message to be sent by the application program is mapped to the device's screen or the remote program. The MFS control blocks are compiled off line from the MFS source files and are stored in the host format library by the MFS language utility.
Currently, there are four types of MFS control blocks that are used to map input and output messages between an MFS-based application program and a displayable device or remote program. Message Output Descriptors (MODs) describe the layout of the output messages that are received from an MFS-based application program. Device Output Formats (DOFs) described how MFS on-line processing formats output messages for each of the devices or remote programs with which the application communicates. Device Input Formats (DIFs) describe the formats of input messages that MFS on-line processing receives from each of the devices or remote programs with which the application communicates. Message Input Descriptors (MIDs) described how MFS on-line processing further formats input messages so that the application program can process them.
As business processes are updated to exploit new B2B technologies, there is a requirement to support B2B interchanges. However, MFS control blocks are presently coded in an IBM proprietary language format and there does not exist any way to represent MFS control blocks in XML to format XML input and output messages between MFS-based IMS applications and displayable devices, e.g., PDA or Web browsers, or remote programs. Also, it is currently problematic to save and load XML files without the existence of external references.
A non-proprietary, industry-wide standard method is needed to represent the information in today's MFS control blocks. It happens that XML is growing in acceptance as the universal data format which can be the input and output for any application. If the MFS control blocks are represented in XML, they can easily be used for developing new software to map XML messages for IMS MFS transaction applications. Using MFS control blocks in XML can encourage a wide range of connection types and tools to be developed and provide a simple and unified way to re-use existing MFS-based IMS transaction applications.
Accordingly, there is a need for a system and method for representing MFS control blocks in an industry-wide standard format. Moreover, there is a need for a system and method for allowing references to external XML files containing MFS control blocks from within a given XML file without having the external XML files present and/or created.